Friday, January 02, 2015

Iraq: No Ebola, Sunni clerics assassinated and IBC wants you to forget that they altered a body count on orders from the US government

A frantic e-mail from a drive-by reader insists that I have missed the biggest Iraq story of 2014, the Ebola! The Ebola!

While we never noted that nonsense that popped up at some outlets about 3 days ago, we didn't miss it. I just don't trust the outlets promoting it or the claims being offered. Alsumaria, an Iraqi outlet, addresses the Ebola today and the frantic e-mailer might want to calm down.

Alsumaria notes Iraq's Ministry of Health denounced the rumors yesterday and declared there are no known cases of Ebola in Iraq.

I'm not one to blindly believe a ministry (of any country, including the US).

However, the story was part of a wave of smears on the Islamic State (again, there's no need to create lies about the Islamic State, they're actions are outrageous enough and when you lie and your lie explodes it means readers start to doubt the true things about the Islamic State that you actually are reporting), it was weak and weakly sourced, if Ebola was there then WHO would know about it and no one I talked to at WHO believed the 'reports' and, finally, if Iraq has Ebola and the Ministry of Health is lying, that won't take long to prove. Ebola would quickly spread and the Ministry of Health would not only look like a liar but the Parliament would quickly vote the Minister in charge out of office and a new Minister would be named. This would not take place over a period of months but move very quickly.

So it's not in the interest of the Ministry of Health to lie about this. Were this, for example, a claim by the Ministry that no one was suffering from the lack of potable water, I'd be skeptical in part because I know how easy that would be to cover up -- including any deaths from it.

But Ebola is a different issue and the Ministry could not cover it up and it would be a huge story by the end of next week because there would be other outbreaks.

I don't believe we missed that 'report.'

We do miss things all the time.

That isn't one of them.

Qassim Abdul-Zahra (AP) reports an attack in Basra last night left 3 Sunni clerics dead. Just above, we were noting how some officials lie? The Ministry of Interior is a place lies fly out of all the time. It's been that way for eight years now. So their attempt to pin the attack on the Islamic State?

We're not as gullible as the Associated Press.

As AFP notes that "the Iraqi Islamic Party, one of the main Sunni political parties, said
the attack was carried out by 'criminal militias,' an apparent reference
to Shiite fighters Baghdad has turned to for support in its battle
against IS." And, of course, these Shi'ite militias forces would have been part of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's tour of Basra on December 31st and clearly could have stayed the next day to take part in the assassinations. The Iraqi military that the US wants to train first needs to be purged of all criminal militia elements -- including those who, of course, kidnapped and killed US troops -- for those who missed it, Barack Obama released some of those in 2009 as a deal to get the League of Righteous to release the 1 living British hostage and the corpses of the other British hostages -- but remember, Barack insists that he doesn't make deals with terrorists. (The League of Righteous has been very clear that a deal was made -- very clear to the Iraqi press.)

Alsumaria notes that Speaker of Parliament Salim al-Jubouri has called today for a serious investigation, for accountability and for prosecution over these assassinations (two more clerics were left injured in the attack). And, no surprise, he's not satisfied with leaving the investigation to the Ministry of the Interior and wants Parliament to form an investigative committee as well.

We're not interested in the crap ass Iraq Body Count which, as we exposed sometime ago, does the bidding of the US State Dept. For all its failures, we'll go with UNAMI's count when it is released. But Iraq Body Count altered their count on the orders of the US State Dept. When they did that, we called it out here and dropped them as a reliable source.

After we exposed them, they suffered but, in the new year, there's an effort to promote them again.

Sorry, you don't come back from altering your published numbers on the orders of the US government.

Dennis e-mailed to ask about the timing? They were supposed to start going up at 11:30 pm my time (PST). I had told Martha and Shirley I'd do the images for their piece. I had not written my piece yet but the plan was to give an hour to 90 minutes for each piece to be at the top so it could have the spotlight. (That happened with everything except Isaiah's comic. Which is why after my piece went up 10 minutes later, I changed the time on Isaiah's comic to make it the top piece.) At 11:30, I started puking and that continued until four my time. I then took an hour nap and then started (after working out and showering) on posting the various pieces and writing my own. Mine is no where what it was intended to be but it is what it is. My apologies to anyone who was waiting for the pieces to go up, they should have gone up by midnight at the latest.

Cedric and Wally posted this morning, the other community sites posted on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning:

About Me

We do not open attachments. Stop e-mailing them. Threats and abusive e-mail are not covered by any privacy rule. This isn't to the reporters at a certain paper (keep 'em coming, they are funny). This is for the likes of failed comics who think they can threaten via e-mails and then whine, "E-mails are supposed to be private." E-mail threats will be turned over to the FBI and they will be noted here with the names and anything I feel like quoting.
This also applies to anyone writing to complain about a friend of mine. That's not why the public account exists.